4. Simplify Your System

Chapter 4. Simplify your system. Simplicity enables change. I think it is a primary source of real agility. Agility means to do something. It does not mean to do it over. It does not mean to redo it. It does not mean to undo it. It means to do it. It means that I am here and I am going to go there. That is agility. And if you're dragging an elephant around, you are never going to be agile. Rich Hickey, creator of the closure programming language. In the early 20th century, Argentina was one of the wealthiest and most prized countries in the world. Known as the bread basket of the world, with its rich natural resources, growing exports of quality beef and grain and its cosmopolitan cities, Argentina's wealth rivaled the United States and Australia. Less than 100 years later, its economy was a dumpster fire, one of the worst in the world. From 1946, when Juan Domingo Prón became president all the way through 2023, Argentina has been plagued by corrupt, careless, and misinformed leadership. Prón, though popular during his presidency, introduced expansive welfare programs and labor policies that even decades after his reign crippled Argentina's economy and culture. He created dependency by giving too much government assistance. He destroyed entrepreneurship by exerting state and governmental controls over several industries facilitating inefficiency and corruption. Then Argentina went through a series of dictatorial presidents who over-invested in their military and ballooned the nation's debt by nearly a factor of 10 during the 1970s to mid-1980s. Policies were put in place to de-industrialize the economy, favoring imports over local production. The byproduct was a plummeting industrial sector with huge job losses. By the late 1980s, loose monetary policies and extreme debt led to hyperinflation up to nearly 3,000 percent driving the peso's value to practically nothing. Despite attempts to peg the peso to the dollar to stabilize the economy, these attempts failed and the economy entirely collapsed. Prices skyrocketed and the people couldn't afford basic things like groceries. The wealthy class fled to more stable countries. At rock bottom in 2001, Argentina defaulted on its sovereign debts, causing nearly all of the world to lose both trust and interest in the country. It was one of the most extreme and devastating freefalls witnessed in modern times from an economic and cultural leader to the absolute drags, with zero credibility from within or without. As if this weren't bad enough, more than a generation of people's livelihood was stolen from them by poor leadership and mismanagement, the next 20 years didn't get any better. During the 2000s, all the way to 2023, the Argentine government increased government policies making business and economic growth nearly impossible. These policies increased inflation and further reduced Argentina's appeal to foreign investors. During the 2023 presidential elections, the economy was again on the brink of complete collapse. Inflation was over 140% for the year. More than 40% of the population was in deep poverty. A bloated public sector with far too many government workers ate up nearly 40% of the country's entire GDP gross domestic product. Their foreign reserves, such as foreign currencies, gold and government bonds, were at record lows with the country threatening default on its looming debt repayments. It was clear to the Argentine people they needed change, drastic change, and quick. Javier Malay, a well-known and somewhat extreme economics professor and business consultant, felt that God had called him to fix the situation. For over two decades, Malay taught growth economics at multiple universities throughout Argentina. He gained prominence as a television pundit, criticizing Argentina's political and economic establishment. Malay felt strongly that the government was the main obstacle to Argentina's prosperity. He felt it needed to be hacked and stripped down to the studs, which is why as part of his 2022, 2023 presidential campaign, he would regularly come on stage with rock music and a chance on his hands screaming profanities and saying the government needed to be cut down. Economic liberalization and anti-establishment comprised Malay's bold message. It resonated. Malay was an aggrade president of Argentina on December 10, 2023. Over the next 12 months, Argentina experienced perhaps the greatest economic shift of all time. His key initiatives were dollarizing the economy, replacing the peso and radically minimizing government. He wanted to turn the state into a facilitator of growth rather than a participant. During 2024, Malay simplified the 24 government ministries down to eight, eliminating key positions in education, health, and social development. He eliminated over 300 government regulations, targeting ones that restricted agriculture and small businesses. He dissolved the complex tax system within the government and replaced it with a simplified, flat tax structure administered by a streamlined agency. Finally, to scale Argentina's economic growth, Malay intensified the focus on Argentina's strengths, which are agriculture and natural energy. To incentivize growth and foreign investment, he slashed taxes on agricultural goods. Through his deregulations, he created an entrepreneurial environment where startups could attract foreign partnerships. To further increase the economy in Argentina, Malay formed strategic and economic alliances with countries like the United States, the European Union, China, and others, seeking to get foreign investment rolling again into Argentine products and services. By the end of Malay's first-year as president, inflation had gone from 140 down to 2.7%. For the first time in over 50 years, the government had achieved a fiscal budget surplus with over $3 billion in surplus cash. The peso had largely stabilized and the default risk dramatically shrink, increasing the confidence of other countries, which led to billions of dollars in foreign investment into Argentina's economy. Although Malay had basically done the impossible, the past 12 months, and created incredible progress, the jury is still out on whether he'll ultimately succeed. What he's attempting is reversing 100 years of bad leadership and corruption, but the moves he's making are in line with good strategy, system design, and scaling principles. In order to scale a system, you've got to simplify it. Simplifying a system is extremely rigorous work, especially emotionally. You've got to make uncomfortable and unpopular decisions that impact not only you, but also others. There's an unattributed quote, "The system is designed to defend the system." This will always be the case when simplifying a system so it can scale in a new and better direction. Malay wants Argentina to scale. His impossible goal is that it becomes one of the thriving economies and cultures of the world again. To do this, he has to simplify the system and strip out the complexity keeping Argentina broke. He's got to increase the transparency and accountability of the system. This is why he wants to get on the dollar system, which is inherently a more accountable currency. He's got to laser focus on the few key initiatives where growth can explode, then make massive swings to get increasing resources that fuel the fire. In the previous chapter, you learned the hard truth about scaling. It doesn't matter how high your vision is if you don't raise your floor, you won't scale. The hardest part about raising your floor is being fully honest with yourself and then removing everything in your life and business that's holding you down. In this chapter, you'll learn the next layer of raising your floor. This will require simplifying your system or business further than you think necessary. You may not be in a situation like Argentina where simplifying your system is essential for survival. Maybe your business is doing quite well, but the truth is you won't be able to radically scale, say 10x to 100x or more, without stripping much if not all of what you're now doing. Scaling always involves simplifying and remodeling, then aggressively moving forward on the new and innovative pathway. Stop trying to optimize several things. Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple, but it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains. Steve Jobs. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, Apple was in serious trouble losing over $1 billion per year. At the time of Jobs Return, Apple had around 350 products. Jobs first move was to cut it down to around 10 connected products, refocusing the company. He also secured a $150 million investment from Microsoft, helping restore confidence in the company. By 1998, just a year after his return, Apple reported a $309 million profit for the fiscal year. The turnaround was solidified with the launch of the iMac G3, which became a massive success. Steve Jobs said, "People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on, but that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. Innovation is saying no to a thousand things. Simplicity is essential to scaling. Most systems aren't simple enough to scale. There are far too many things going on in the business, whether tiered product lines, multiple computing offers, etc. Scaling requires focus. Focus requires simplicity. In a talk titled "Simplicity Matters," the computer coder and inventor Rich Hickey explained that simplicity is essential for changing something, whether a country, a business, a habit, or even a piece of written code, whereas complexity makes it both difficult and unlikely for change and growth to occur. The word "simple" comes from the Latin root "simplex," which means one fold or unentangled. Conversely, the word "complex" derives from the Latin root "complexus," meaning "braided" or "twisted together." Something simple can stand and be understood on its own. Something complex involves interwoven components that cannot be separated, making it harder to manage or change. When Hickey's talk largely directed to computer coders, Hickey discusses the elephant that naturally emerges when they begin a new project or business. As he states, "As we keep working, what happens is, there is a new participant in our standup. It is growing in the corner of the room. It is this elephant. It is called the software we have already written. The elephant of the software we have already written is actually going to completely dominate what we do. So we are asked to do more, right? That first iteration is a breeze. We can do something. But as we move forward, we have to take what we already have and make it, that elephant, do more, make it do it differently, make it do things better." What Hickey is explaining is that, naturally, all systems become complex. The greatest obstacle to a system advancing or scaling becomes itself. If you are a coder, the elephant is the code you have already built, which is now a complex hair ball you are trying to drag around with you, or trying to manipulate as you attempt adjusting and moving into the future. You may not have 350 products like Apple had when Steve Jobs returned and which he needed to strip away to simplify Apple. But chances are, your system is far too complex to scale. Those are, you are doing far too many things, most of which are holding you back. You may not think they are holding you back. You probably think everything you are doing makes logical sense, and that it all fits together. That everything you do synergizes. Trust me, I thought the same thing, until a dear friend and mentor of mine, Chad Willardson called me out hard. He said, "Ben, I feel like you are one of the best authors in the world, but I see you doing so many other things. You make YouTube videos, you do coaching calls, keynotes, consulting, all of those things you are quite good at. But not like you are writing. What if you quit all of that other stuff and truly focused on writing more and better books? How good do you think you could get and how far do you think you could go? This brutally honest conversation was near the end of 2023. Chad was inviting me to think far bigger about my own future self. What could I become if I actually focused? Did I trust myself enough to cut out the majority of what I was doing? Being honest with myself, why was I hedging so much? Why was I doing so many things? The shocking truth was that I thought I was focused. Yet with my fresh eyes and Chad's directness, it was obvious I wasn't. I was trying to optimize far too many things. My lack of focus highlighted a lack of conviction and commitment on my part. It's also highlighted my own floor because I was saying yes to things that were good but would never be great. I was saying yes to dead end pathways, such as a YouTube channel, which even if it scaled 10x to 100x, wouldn't have the power to produce the results I wanted. Take all of the pathways and pursuits you're currently focusing on and mentally scale each of them up to their highest potential. When you do that, does each pathway actually give you what you want? For me, thinking about my YouTube channel, the obvious answer was no. Thinking about my coaching program, the answer was no. Same with the consulting to several big and interesting companies. So I removed them, focusing instead on the pathway I felt could take me the furthest and that resonated with where I wanted to go. When I publicly quit my YouTube channel and let go of the marketing team managing it, I got all sorts of emails and texts from people shocked. How could you get rid of that, they asked? He was starting to grow really quickly. They couldn't see the scale of my goal and that even the seemingly great things I was doing were mostly distractions. I was stripping out my own elephants added weight so I could focus far more intensely. Chad himself had recently simplified his own wealth management business. Already a high-end firm, he manages over a billion dollars for entrepreneurs. Yet, as he looked at his 150 client base, around 100 of them had between 1 million and 10 million dollars with him. The top 50 of his clients, which made up nearly 90% of the overall money he managed, each had well over 10 million dollars, often closer to 50 to 150 million dollars invested with him. He decided to sell the portion of his business that was 10 million dollars and below. Though he loved and cared for those people, he wanted to simplify his business model even more so it could scale to the next level. He wanted to go deeper in their firm's ability to truly support their top family office clients. Wildly, on literally the same day they sold the 100 client portion of their business, a man walked into Chad's office wanting more information about their experience. In learning more about this man, it turned out he was anticipating a payday of over 1 billion dollars and wants a family office. He was looking for a specialist like Chad and his team to manage his family office money coming in later that year. This was exactly the type of person Chad wanted to work with and it was exactly the type of work he wanted to further optimize their systems and capabilities around. This brings up a very, very important point, one that is both psychological and spiritual. Until you remove the complexity from your system that reflects your past but not your desired future, you won't be able to powerfully filter for what you want. Your filter will be too dull as you'll be mired in the complexity of everything below your floor that you're still systemizing. Spiritually though, once you make bold moves and live on a higher plane like Chad, you immediately become a magnet for radically bigger and aligned opportunities that can't be yours while below your floor. Good strategy means choosing what you're optimizing for. The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. Dr. Michael Porter, Harvard's strategy expert. Warren Buffett, the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway once said, "Diversification is protection against ignorance. It makes little sense if you know what you are doing. What Buffett means is, if you're overly diversified in your focus, then you don't really know what you're doing. If you know what you're doing, you'd fully focus and commit. We've heard it said that if you want to be wealthy, you need to have multiple income streams, but wealth comes through concentration of focus, not diversification of focus. This brings up a crucial question. What are you optimizing for? Your answer to that question, whether you can clearly articulate it or not, is what is shaping the system of your life and business. If you're trying to optimize for several things, you're optimizing for none. You have a complex system that isn't scaling in the way it could. You're likely experiencing one-tenth to one-hundredth of the growth that could be yours. Again, honesty is a key to scaling. You can't scale if you're still chasing vanity metrics. Whenever I see someone doing tons of different things, I know they're lying to themselves. They've convinced themselves they're focused, but they're not. They've convinced themselves they have a synergistic system of multiple focuses when they have a complex system that's less scalable than they realize. In his book, Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, Dr. Richard Romalt wrote, "Having conflicting goals, dedicating resources to unconnected targets and accommodating incompatible interests are the luxuries of the rich and powerful, but they make for bad strategy. Strategy is at least as much about what an organization does not do as it is about what it does. Strategy is scarcity's child, and to have a strategy rather than vague aspirations is to choose one path and to issue others." Romalt is right. To have a strategy means to make a choice or a decision. Making a decision means cutting away alternative options or pathways. It means choosing one path rather than 50. To scale 10x to 100x where you're currently at and to achieve that growth in just a few years rather than a few decades, you must eliminate most of what you're doing. you're now doing. You've got to simplify and remodel your system so it can actually scale. You've got to get rid of the elephant you're trying to drag around with you, making your system far more complex than you realize. In 2018, Rory Vaden, a marketing and branding strategist, received a call from Lewis House. They'd known each other for a few years, and Lewis felt he could use Rory's expertise. Though from the outside things looked like they were going well, the truth was that Lewis was a bit overwhelmed. At the time, Lewis was regularly speaking and doing his own live events, had a mastermind, coaching programs, and a membership site had just released a new book and was considering another coaching program. All told, Lewis had 17 different streams of income. Also at that time, his podcast was growing extremely well with over 30 million downloads. In dissecting each part of Lewis's business, it became clear to Rory that Lewis viewed the podcast as a fringe part of his business, but not the core of it. What if you just focused solely on scaling your podcast, Rory asked. Lewis was immediately excited and decided that for the next few years, he would say no to practically everything that wasn't his podcast. He began systematically eliminating what he'd been doing from his elite masterminds to his coaching programs, etc. He walked away from millions of dollars of easy revenue to focus. Over the next two years, with relentless focus on his podcast, it went from 30 million downloads to over 500 million downloads becoming one of the biggest in the entire world. In order to scale, you've got to strip out the elephant of your complex system. To raise your floor and simplify, you've got to start from the frame of an impossible goal. That goal is what shapes and simplifies the focus of your new system. Of course, letting go of the elephant, despite being needed to scale, can be emotional. Take for example, Stephanie mentioned in the introduction of this audiobook, who is the CEO of a family business that provides a highly specialized product. This product was invented and patented by her father over 50 years ago. Though he passed away over a decade ago, the company continues to serve their clients and, in 2023, made approximately 30 million dollars in revenue. Since her father's passing, Stephanie has felt that transitioning the business to provide services, not just their niche products, would be important for the growth of the company. The product side that's been the basis of their company, though amazing, doesn't really have much potential to scale from where they're at. Stephanie knows this. She's wanted to make some acquisitions to bolster the services side of the business, maybe a nearby industry partner they've worked with for years. Despite being in entrepreneurial training programs for over a decade, Stephanie has never been able to pull the trigger on any acquisitions. Stephanie joined our program in early 2024 and learned the scaling framework. She was challenged to set an impossible goal and to utilize that goal to reframe and remodel her business to scale. She changed her 2024 revenue goal from 35 million to 70 million dollars. Once that goal was established, it became painfully obvious that she couldn't grow that fast, focusing on the products that defined their company. She couldn't get to 70 million dollars in even a decade, let alone 12 months, simply by attempting to scale their products. The impossible goal made it dead obvious that to scale the company that high and that aggressively, she'd need to finally get serious about the services side of the company, which she had known for many years was the right pathway. As part of the program, Stephanie committed to making the acquisition of her industry partner within 90 days, even though she had no clue whether the other company would be even willing to sell. She called the owner who had been a longtime friend. "Hey, are we going to keep dating or do you want to finally get married?" She was talking about merging the companies. He laughed. After their discussion, she was amazed how cheap she was actually able to acquire the company. The owner wasn't a good business operator and preferred just having a salary, so getting acquired was actually great for him as well. In buying this company, Stephanie now had an incredibly talented and capable team, including the services they provided. All of this was a quantum leap to the services side of Stephanie's business, and they now were ready to really begin scaling. During a follow-up conversation I had with Stephanie around this time, she reported to me the move she was making. She told me of the acquisition and integration of the new company. She told me they were increasing the focus on the services side of the business. I asked her, "Are you willing to simplify your business and focus to achieve your impossible goal of $70 million in revenue this year?" She replied, "With new technologies, we can shift our products side of the company over to e-commerce and, honestly, not really think about it. Instead, we can focus on scaling the services side of the business, which I believe can get us to our $70 million goal." I then asked, "What would happen if you simply sold the product side of the business?" Audible, she let out a loud and surprised, "Whoa!" It had never dawned on her that she could fully remove the main product, simplify and remodel their system and scale in a totally new direction. Her plan was to keep and maintain the products side of the business and to just largely ignore it. After pondering for a bit, Stephanie replied, "Somewhat thinking out loud. What's interesting about what you're saying is, since we've acquired our competitor, we've set up a new holding company separating the products and services sides of our business. Also, we have a strategic partner we've had for over 40 years that would love to buy the product side of the business." I then asked her another zinger, "Stephanie, what if the goal of your company was hundreds of millions in revenue rather than the $70 million you've established? Do you see a way of getting there if you solely focused on the services you're offering?" "Absolutely," she replied. In fact, there's another company similar to the one we just acquired that is about to go bankrupt, and it's chock full of PhD level talent that would be incredibly expensive and difficult to get one at a time. I could see that if I sold off the products side of the company, I could begin making strategic acquisitions like this and could likely search to hundreds of millions quickly. That's where our conversation ended. Stephanie's story is extremely common. Her company is doing well with multiple eight figures in revenue. Yet, to 10x or more, she'd need to simplify and remodel the business and take it in a new direction. That new direction becomes clear when reverse engineering and impossible goal, which in her case would be doing hundreds of millions in revenue within three years. If she operated from the frame of an impossible goal, the pathways to that goal begin to emerge. But also, it becomes obvious which pathways won't scale to that level. In her case, it is the elephant of her father's products and the identity of what the company has been. Dr. Mitsuruigami, a Canadian economist, focused on innovation, reviewed the data published in the classic book The Innovators Delema by Dr. Clayton Christensen. After reviewing the data, Dr.igami concluded that Christensen's thesis wasn't exactly right. Christensen's core argument is that successful firms get disrupted because they are doing a good job, not a bad one. By increasingly specializing their services and the value they provide to higher and higher end customers, the bottom of the market becomes available for disruption. In due time, smaller firms bring in new technologies, etc., which the bigger and specialized firms fail to adopt and over time take over the entire market. Although this is true, Dr.igami's dig into the data shows something interesting. The bigger firms didn't get disrupted blindly. They had become aware long before being disrupted about new technologies or directions they could take. From their vaulted position, they actually had a better look at where the future was going. However, these firms made the conscious decision not to begin planning for the future, and instead continued focusing on what they knew was becoming an outdated model and process. Pivoting is often extremely painful and seemingly risky for companies because it means cannibalizing their existing business or clients and most are unwilling to face that short term cost for the next level of scaling. In business, cannibalization is when a company's new product or service competes with an existing product or service and causes a loss in sales. Pivoting is another word for raising the floor. It means letting go of some aspect of what you're doing to increase your focus in a better, more scalable direction. To quote the strategy expert, Richard Koch, success, not failure, most urgently requires change. Follow the path of natural selection. If it ain't broke, do fix it. In other words, if you're not continually innovating and transforming what you're doing, then quickly, likely very quickly, your elephant will get so big and slow that your growth will hit a brick wall. See the illustration and description on complex systems in the PDF. Until the floor truly becomes the floor, you won't scale. The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything. Warren Buffett. On April 20th, 2023, I spoke at the EOS Entrepreneurial Operating System Annual Event in Indianapolis, Indiana to an audience of over 2,000 entrepreneurs. In my 60-minute keynote, I taught two specific frameworks, my never-before-published, holistic time model, detailed in the appendix, and also in the PDF, as well as the 10X versus 2X 80-20 model Dan Sullivan and I developed for our third book, 10X is easier than 2X. As I walked off stage, Tom Wood, the CEO of Floor Coverings International, FCI, a large franchise business, turned to his right-hand leader Chadden said, "We need to better understand that material." Chad agreed. Three months after the EOS event, I spoke with Tom on the phone for the first time. He asked what it would take for me to come out and train his leadership team for a day on the concepts I taught from the stage. He said he was willing to invest whatever it took, because he really wanted FCI to become a billion-dollar company and felt I could help them get there. I asked Tom, "When do you want to reach $1 billion in revenue?" "Seven years," he replied. "2030. An arbitrary round number," I thought. I pushed back, referencing time as a tool which I taught during my EOS keynote. What does seven years require of you today, I asked? "What do you mean," Tom replied. "The primary value and purpose of a goal is its impact on your direction and decisions today," I explained. The future is a tool to simplify the present. "If you committed to $1 billion in three years rather than seven, how would that change things here and now," I asked. "We'd have to make some big changes ASAP," he replied. "I was already starting to love Tom. I felt a kinship with him and wanted to be a part of his process." That August I did a full-day training at FCI's corporate headquarters with Tom and his 15-person corporate leadership team. During that training, we established 1 billion in annual revenue in three years as the new frame or impossible goal. From there, we established the floor to reach 1 billion, which was having all their franchisees averaging $2 million plus in annual revenue. At that time, the average franchisee was doing $700,000. During that first meeting, I stressed heavily the importance of them raising the floor if they were to reach the $1 billion goal. As I explained, "We know $700,000 is your current floor because that's what your current system is designed to produce. It's also the culture of your corporate team and the culture of the franchisees themselves. Buy your fruits, you shall know them." "Our new floor of $2 million," I said flatly, "will require you to filter out everything that stops you from systematically producing $2 million plus franchisees." What remains will need to be simplified. If $2 million plus is truly the new floor, then anything below that is no longer acceptable. It literally goes against who you are and what you're about. Are you serious about this or not? It took Tom and his leadership team around 6 months to fully own the new floor, meaning anything below it was literally axed. Eliminated. Gone. Buy. For the first 6 months or so, in Tom's words, there were only minor demonstrations of accountability when someone on the corporate team was going below the floor. Those minor demonstrations were basically words, not serious consequences. Tom would call his leaders out, but nothing else really happened. As the months went by, an FCI's revenue remained flat. Tom's blood began to boil. He knew accountability could no longer simply be words, but needed to be more major. He began firing members of the leadership team who continued investing time in any franchisees who were uncommitted to reaching the new floor. During the second half of 2024, Tom fired and replaced more people within a 6 month period than he had the previous 10 years, over 25% of the corporate team. He replaced longstanding team members with those far more capable and committed to getting FCI to $1 billion in revenue. When Tom made public the new $2 million floor, there was extreme resistance from the majority of the franchisees. Despite only being a 2.5 times jump, most of them genuinely felt getting their business to $2 million in revenue was literally impossible. Tom and Chad began to develop a phrase, the floor is the floor. What they meant by this was, the floor really is the floor. Once the floor truly became the floor, not just an idea or a metaphor, the growth of the company began to skyrocket. For the franchisees who were defensive about their performance and committed to the status quo, they were encouraged to sell back their territories and move on. With 30 franchisees were dismissed from the company and their territories were purchased by other franchisees who were aggressively growing. By the end of 2024, the entire flooring industry in the United States was down an average of 7%. FCI as an organization was up 31% of what they had done the year prior. Moreover, they were clearly surging to their $1 billion goal. There were 18 franchisees over the $2 million revenue baseline, many of whom were committed to reaching $10 million plus within the next 3 years. Additionally, they had well over 60 franchisees hard trending to 2-5 million in the next 12 months. The nearly 100 new franchisees brought on during 2024 are already passing the majority of legacy franchisees in revenue during their first year. Going into 2025, Tom and his team are aggressively filtering out all franchisees who won't grow above the $2 million floor and are aggressively filtering 4 tons of new franchisees who want to build $5 to $10 million plus businesses within the next 3 years. None of this progress occurred until Tom stopped going below the floor. Once the floor truly became the floor, growth skyrocketed. As a final brief example on the scaling impact of raising the floor, consider how Richie Norton and TFN McGrey simplified their business product. Product is a full service physical product creation company that makes over 100 products at any given time, from transformers for AI data centers to journals to yoga pants. When they started, they would take anyone with an idea, no matter how small as a client. After 7 years of taking any client and doing pretty well with it, it became clear to Richie and TFN that over 80% of their clients spent less than $25,000, such as t-shirts, toys, fly fishing rods, etc. They decided to set $25,000 as the new floor and immediately stopped taking new clients spending less. By setting this floor, they went from 80% of their clients spending less than $25,000 to 0% spending less and surprisingly, now they have many clients spending $1 million or more per project. They made the conscious decision to optimize for much bigger clients and immediately began getting many 6 and 7 figure projects. Projects at this scale were rare before they raised their floor. Products revenue per client 10x in less than 2 years after raising their floor. By just making that one simple choice, by simplifying their model. As we conclude part 2 on raising your floor, there are some important questions you'll need to ask yourself. The first question is, what are you optimizing for? Most people don't have a clear and compelling answer to this question. They haven't clearly defined themselves. We do this. The second question is, what are you currently saying yes to? Whatever you say yes to reflects your actual floor, not the required floor of your goal. People often think their floor is higher than it really is. They say their keynote fee is $50,000 but regularly accept lower ones for various reasons. The real floor is whatever you actually say yes to and until you eliminate everything below the required floor of your goal, you won't scale. The third question is, what pathways are you still investing yourself in that are ultimately dead ends? Mentally scale up all the pathways you're currently pursuing to their highest possible place. By doing that, which of them can truly get you where you're going? Being honest with yourself, how much of what you're doing is pursuing lesser goals or vanity metrics which won't scale. Only when the floor truly becomes the floor will you begin scaling aggressively. This will be your superpower once you're ready. This is what most people and most companies won't do. Simplify to scale. Journal prompts and applications. What is the elephant in your life and business that you're dragging around with you? What aspects of your complex system are diluting your focus and stopping you from 10xing or more what actually matters and can scale? What if the floor for a much higher future actually became your floor? What if you stop saying yes to stuff that has unbelievable opportunity cost? Go to scaling.com/book1 and complete the form to evaluate your current readiness to scale.